


Oatcakes, Cinderwelts

by cadmean



Series: summer in ash-town [2]
Category: Original Work
Genre: Cats, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-24
Updated: 2020-10-24
Packaged: 2021-03-08 20:55:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,030
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27182782
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cadmean/pseuds/cadmean
Summary: Nobody ever really comes to Ashton.
Relationships: Lonely Old Lady Ghost & Child She Befriends
Series: summer in ash-town [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2021174
Comments: 7
Kudos: 6
Collections: Fic In A Box





	Oatcakes, Cinderwelts

**Author's Note:**

  * For [DesertVixen](https://archiveofourown.org/users/DesertVixen/gifts).



There’s three days left of summer break and though she’s spent a fair few weeks watching the children race past her house on their bikes, and the teens roll on townwards in their cars, the most exciting thing to happen to Claudia so far is that a large, wide-set moving truck stops in front of the empty house across the street while she’s in her chair on the veranda, reading a book.

This is remarkable for two reasons:

One, the house across the street has been empty for all of Claudia’s life. For all the time that she can remember, nobody has ever lived in that house – and though it’s a beautiful thing full of cute little corners and stylized arches, Claudia can’t remember ever seeing someone even show interest in the house at all. It’s just stood empty, and somewhere deep down Claudia had come to accept that it would stay that way and would simply continue to exist, beautiful and uninhabited, for the rest of her life.

Two, the moving truck has the company’s address written all over its sides in bright red letters, and that address is from three states over. This is what really catches Claudia’s interest – whoever was moving into the empty house could’ve just been some family from some other part of Ashton, and while that would’ve been exciting, too, it wouldn’t have been cause for Claudia to set down her book on the little table her younger brother had built her, and watch the happenings across the street with eagle eyes. No. An address from out of state means that this is somebody new moving in, and that is more than enough reason for Claudia to set aside her novel.

You see: nobody ever really comes to Ashton. People pass through it just fine – the highway winding through the fields outside of town brings its fair share of truckers and travelers and a handful of tourists every year, too, but those are all of them just passing through. Nobody ever actually stays, and it’s not like Claudia can really fault them for it, either.

Ashton is Ashton, and though she’s come to love its golden fields and the green-damp forests surrounding it, the town itself is a small, close-knit little thing. Her family’s been there for close to two centuries – Gramma showed up at the town gates with her four children in tow one day, and because nobody wanted to refuse the stern-looking lady she got herself a house and a yard and eventually another husband, too, “and that, Claudia, is how family history happens” – and well, Claudia’s been in Ashton for almost a century herself now, and she’s fairly certain nothing at all will be able to drag her away from it, at this point.

But the very thing that keeps her here – Ashton’s history, and her own family’s history, so intertwined with all the others’ – is also what makes it so difficult for newcomers to find a place to settle in the small town: none of Ashton’s residents are particularly hostile towards outsiders, mind you, but Claudia also well remembers that it’s been almost forty years since Pat McGill’s family bought the house next to the old gas station, and they’re still on occasion referred to as “the new family”.

And so Claudia watches the moving truck shudder to a halt right in the middle of the overgrown driveway and its two occupants disembark and take their first good look at the house, she thinks, _Well then._ _All the excitement of summer packed into its last three days_.

* * *

That evening, when she comes back out onto the veranda again – it’s too hot outside by far during the rest of the day – Claudia sees that the truck has been all but emptied. The windows of the empty house across the street are all thrown wide open now, too; a light breeze whistling down the street and across the lawns and, presumably, straight through the open front door.

There’s more than enough dead air in that empty house, Claudia thinks, to last anyone a lifetime – good on the new occupants for getting a headstart on clearing it all out.

With that in mind she leaves the door of her own house open as well, and the porch door, too; soon enough the breeze is playing through the wind chimes some long-lost neighbor gifted her all too many years ago. The sound it makes is still beautiful, though: a few long, drawn-out notes interspersed with several duller, cleaner pings and plinks. It puts Claudia in mind of livelier days; those long-gone years when the summers scorched her to the bone and the winters scoured what remained, of the wind in the rustling leaves as fall approached – of planting the new flowerbeds in spring, first together with her mother, then with her husband, and then, for those last few years, on her own.

The flowerbeds are still right where she’s left them, of course, but Claudia’s not planted anything in them for years now. They’re overgrown not with weeds but with all kinds of wild-blooming plants; colorful and with petals and bulbs of various shapes and sizes, the beds are a delight to wake up to every morning. Claudia looks over at them now, watching with a small smile as the wind plays with the wide heads of one of the chrysanthemums—

And then she notices the head of red hair poking up from between the yellow flowers.

Now, as you’ll recall nobody ever really comes to Ashton, and just the same nobody ever really comes to Claudia’s little house at the end of the cul-de-sac on the outskirts of town, either.

But there is very definitely someone with red hair hiding among her flowers, now, and if Claudia’s memory isn’t going entirely, she has a good idea where exactly she’s spied that mop of hair before: “You’re the little girl who just moved in next door, aren’t you? Why, hello there!”

The child – yes, sized just right to slowly get to her feet and yet still only stand half a head taller than Claudia’s flowers – startles at the sound of her voice and that, in itself, is very curious. Claudia bites back her own little noise of surprise when the child lifts her head and stares up at her: it’s a girl, and quite young at that, and her eyes—well, Claudia’s never been one to put much stock in the idea of souls, but in this case she thinks she’ll have to make an exception. The little girl’s eyes are the color of a meadow at dusk, with the old fires creeping in from over the horizon, and Claudia can’t help but wonder if that is the reason she’s here, now. Or at least part of the reason, she amends, thinking back to what must have been the girl’s mother exiting the moving truck together with her.

The girl still hasn’t said anything, and so Claudia, still smiling the most welcoming smile she can, tries again, “Did you wander too far from your new home? Do you need help?” She waits another moment, then, throwing an arm back to point at her own house, she continues, “I live right over here, so if there’s anything I can help you with—“

“I’m not supposed to go running off,” the little girl tells her all of a sudden. Her tone is half-sullen, half-conspiratorial; she’s also once again kneeling in the flowerpatch and so it comes across as if the very flowers themselves are whispering to Claudia. She likes the imagery of that. “Mom’s still setting up the house but I can’t help with any of that, and then I saw the—your flowers, and I thought I could pick some and put them on a table?”

“A very sensible idea,” Claudia agrees after a moment, nodding amicably at the girl. She gestures, gently, for her to come forward and out of the patch. 

There’s a moment of hesitation, and Claudia says nothing while the girl battles through it – and then, after another moment, she gets up and brushes off the dirt from her bare legs and steps towards Claudia.

The girl is smaller than Claudia had first assumed, she sees now; barely coming up to her hip and a good quarter of that height seems to be in the girl’s curled hair. She has a bright smile, too, and she hesitantly flashes it up at Claudia now and sticks out her hand towards her.

“I’m Charlotte May,” the girl introduces herself, all child-like business now, and Claudia gives her the brightest grin she can in response, as encouraging as she’s ever smiled. Charlotte quickly responds in kind: she’s three teeth short, Claudia sees, and that only makes her smile all the wider.

“I’m Claudia,” says Claudia, and because she’s of that age where she’s allowed to do it and she’s just never managed to warm up to handshakes, she reaches out slowly and gently ruffles through Charlotte’s hair. “It’s good to meet you, Charlotte May. But it wasn’t really the flowers that brought you to my flowerpatch, was it?”

Little Charlotte blushes at that. She averts her eyes, bites her lip, and then, very suddenly, meets Claudia’s gaze with such intense ferocity that Claudia can only blink. “I thought I saw my cat in the flowers.”

“You ‘thought’?”

“He wasn’t there. I didn’t think he would be, but—I thought I’d seen him, Miss Claudia. I had to check.” And she’s so earnest about it, her little hands balled into fists, that Claudia can’t do anything but smile and nod and pat her head again.

“It’s okay! Cats are strange creatures like that, aren’t they? Always so quick to run away, and they’re so good at playing hide-and-seek, too.” She motions for Charlotte to come sit down next to her on the porch. “I can keep an eye out for him if you’d like. I’m good at keeping an eye on things.”

“He was the reason we moved here, you know. Our cat,” Charlotte says before Claudia can continue her own train of thought, “Oreo. Mom says it wasn’t, and that we moved here because the air is nicer and I think that means it probably gives her compliments, but the real reason is that Oreo was _called_ here. He told me so, you know? And cats don’t lie. He told me that as well.”

“Of course they don’t,” Claudia agrees, nodding sagely and making a mental note to keep an eye on the neighborhood’s felines for the next few weeks, just to be safe. “Now—“

“Charlotte, love, where are you? Come back inside, dinner’s almost ready!”

Little Charlotte looks at Claudia. Claudia looks back at the little girl. “Your mother?” Charlotte nods. “You should get going, then. You should never leave your mother waiting!”

Charlotte stares at her for a moment longer, then, with a quick nod, she goes tearing off – jumping over the flower patch! – back to her new home.

Claudia watches her until she’s been ushered back inside the house by her mother, and then she watches a moment longer, because she can, and because she’s had so few neighbours to watch over the last few years.

Her fingers still tingle from where she ruffled the little girl’s hair for hours after.

* * *

Claudia lies in bed that night with ash on her tongue and the bitter smell of tears in her nose. Neither the ash nor the tears belong to her, and so she doesn’t wait for the clamoring outside to stop before she spits them out and wipes them away.

Her bedroom window has been open all evening, to let in the cool summer breeze, and though Claudia likes to listen to the sounds of the world outside her house whenever she can, this night she regrets it: there is a horde of cats outside her window, arguing. They ignore Claudia when she settles her elbows on the windowsill to watch them – she’s not arrogant enough to delude herself into thinking that she’d been too quiet for them to notice her – but settle down just enough for her to be able to watch them have their little squabble.

There’s eight cats, she sees; a quick glance at the far-away flower patch and the house on the other side of the street reveals three more pairs of ears, hiding away behind bushes and garbage cans and a particularly conspicuously-placed traffic cone that most certainly had not been there when Claudia had gotten herself ready for bed. Of those eight visible cats Claudia recognizes only six: there’s a hairless one and another, thick and dark-furred, who appear to be outsiders to the gathered group.

The hairless one, at least, Claudia has heard whispers of among the things that roam the night sky: when Ashton had been smaller and the fires deep underground had not yet begun to glow, something had come to the town. Nobody had seen it but everyone had felt it, and when it had left again the whole town breathed a sigh of relief. It was the hairless cat that defended the town, people began saying soon enough, and though Claudia isn’t quite sure what exactly happened or how the slim little cat figures into it, she’s spent enough time in Ashton to know that actually seeing this being of legend is an . . . omen. Neither good nor bad, but a sign nevertheless – and a particularly strange one at that.

In any case, the hairless cat must have said their piece, because while Claudia is still musing on what that long-ago threat might have been, the little thing cocks its head to the side, gives a loud meow, and then goes darting straight off into the night. The other cats follow along quickly after, each with a sharp yell of their own—

Until, at last, only the fluffy, dark-furred one remains. Its eyes are like the stars in the sky as it turns its head to look up plaintively at Claudia. The two of them stare each other for a moment.

Then, with a sigh, Claudia pushes herself back off of the windowsill and, after rubbing the feeling back into her arms, gestures for the cat to come up.

* * *

The cat never once leaves Claudia’s side over the course of the next day. When she makes breakfast, and when she tends to her garden, and when she goes to have lunch and watch TV to relax for a bit—the cat is with her throughout, constantly brushing up against her legs and wailing quietly for Claudia to scratch behind its ears.

Only in the afternoon does she suddenly find herself completely and utterly alone.

It doesn’t take her long to find the cat, of course, and by the time she walks in on it seated on the windowsill overlooking the house on the other side of the street, Claudia has long figured out who she has sitting there in the summer sun. Oreo watches the house his family has moved into with something that Claudia would call grief, if she had to put a name to it at all – Oreo’s tail is completely limp, and his eyes are focused on the little girl currently running around her new garden with the sort of intensity Claudia’s only come to expect from the truly desperate.

“You want to be with her, don’t you?” she asks when Charlotte has gone back inside and Oreo, after shaking himself full-body, has turned to look at her. “It’s—not impossible, you know. But we’ll have to ease her into it.”

Oreo gently headbutts her arm, and Claudia can’t help a wistful little smile.

* * *

The opportunity to reintroduce the two of them comes the very next day: while Claudia is outside on her porch, sitting in her rocking chair and watching the clouds go by, little Charlotte May comes bounding out of her house with the endless energy that only children have. She goes careening around the tree in her own front yard for a while, until Claudia raises a hand to wave at her and she comes running over, excitedly waving at Claudia herself.

“How have you been settling into your new home so far, Charlotte?” Claudia asks once they’ve both gotten settled back onto the porch chairs. Charlotte has pulled out the bits of cookie she’d been saving from yesterday’s dinner, and after offering some to Claudia – who declined, of course – she’s now happily munching away at them herself. “I saw your mother moving quite a lot of boxes. Have you gotten them all unpacked yet?”

Charlotte, fingers chocolate-dark, nods happily at Claudia. “We’ve got most of them unpacked now! And I like the house just fine, I think; it’s so big and the rooms are all so large and we don’t have to worry about upsetting the downstairs neighbors by being too loud, so mom and I can have all the tickle fights we want. It’s really fun.”

A shadow passes over the little girl’s face just then, and she trails off, fingers raised to her mouth half-forgotten. Claudia gives her a moment. Then she asks, gently, grandmotherly in the way she’d never gotten the opportunity to be, “Are you alright? What’s bothering you, little one?”

Charlotte shrugs, an awkward little gesture that seems an ill fit for her. “I was just thinking. About Oreo. I haven’t seen him properly since we left our old apartment and came here,” she mutters, more to herself than to Claudia, “I see him outside in the yard sometimes! But every time I try to go and pet him or to pick him up to get him to come inside, he disappears. I just . . . I just hope he’s alright, Miss Claudia. I miss him.”

And she understands that, she does – there’s so many people Claudia’s lost track of over the years, down in the town, that she knows that sort of biting, soul-draining worry with all her heart – and so she tells Charlotte, “I think I may have some good news for you, then.”

The disbelieving, joyous grin on little Charlotte May’s face when she sees Oreo hesitantly making his way towards her from beneath the veranda is bright enough to eclipse the sun.

* * *

Little Charlotte May is back the next day, knocking on the door of Claudia’s home that afternoon with the insistent, irregular rhythm of a child so excited that they can’t stop themselves. Claudia’s watched her approach from the roadside-facing window, of course, so it takes her no time at all to open the door and greet her newest neighbor.

“What’s brought you here today, Charlotte dear?” Claudia asks, leaving the door open for Charlotte to come inside. “Are you here to play with Oreo again?”

The girl hesitates a moment, then, casting a sharp look back to her own home, she follows Claudia inside. “Mom says I shouldn’t go into stranger’s houses,” she tells Claudia while the two of them weave their way through several rooms full of chairs and sofas and the dining room, “but I told her that I met you a lot already, so you’re not a stranger anymore. It’s alright.”

Claudia nods and, having finally reached the parlour, gestures for Charlotte to find a seat among the many sofas in the room. The girl does, and before long Oreo extricates himself from whatever small little space he’d been hiding in. He weaves between the little girl’s legs before settling down on Claudia’s lap, where he begins to purr contently.

“Now, dear,” Claudia tries again, for once finding herself at an utter loss in face of the nervous energy Charlotte is currently exuding, “what’s brought you to my house today?”

“It’s Oreo,” Charlotte says, her voice quiet and hesitant. She shoots a quick few glances over to where the cat is still lounging on Claudia’s lap, tail flipping left an right, and the little girl’s arm twitches as if she’s about to reach out to try and pet it – but with an incredible amount of poise for a nine-year-old she stops herself, leaning back into her chair instead. “Mom said—Mom said that he didn’t come with us to Ashton at all.”

Ah. Claudia should have expected something like this.

“Nobody ever really comes to Ashton,” Claudia agrees, and she very deliberately, very slowly runs her fingers through Oreo’s fur. The cat’s purring grows louder. “Did you tell your mother that he’s here with me, now?”

Charlotte readily nods. “I did, and she told me that it was impossible! Because . . .”

She trails off again, and this time, Claudia can only guess what she’s struggling to put into words. She lets the little girl have her moment of silence, and Oreo, too, is wholly still on Claudia’s lap, almost as if he, too, is waiting to hear what little Charlotte will say.

“She said that—Mom said that Oreo hadn’t come with us,” Charlotte eventually begins, not quite yet all the way to having worked herself into hysterics but getting there, quickly, “because Oreo had died back home.”

“I see.”

“And she also said that she asked around town a bit, Miss Claudia, because she wanted to help you with your flowerpatch when she was done putting everything together in the house, and she said that everybody in town, they told her that—“

She was close to crying, now, eyes wide and watery as she looked up at Claudia.

“—they told her that you were dead, too.”

* * *

Nobody ever really comes to Ashton.

Claudia has been living in her house on the edge of Ashton for eighty-nine years now. Only for sixty-eight of those years was she still drawing breath, but if she’s being perfectly honest aside from that, as well an annoying inability to touch actually corporeal things, she’s not noticed much of a difference. True, her eyesight had begun fading some point before her death and she’s seeing better than ever now, and she’s having a lot less difficulties climbing up and down the stairs and working in the garden in the fall, but, well, she supposes something good needs to have come out of the whole thing, and she’ll happily take those changes.

She doesn’t need to sleep anymore, either, but she counts that one as a loss. She always did like sleep, did Claudia, and nowadays no matter how much time she spends lying in bed and looking at the ceiling she can’t even seem to get her eyes to fall shut. Night-time are those hours that Claudia now spends watching the stars, and the moon, and the curious collection of lights that sometimes pass over the town only to then vanish somewhere past Farmer Nell’s fields – and she likes those blue hours very much. There’s also something to be said for a good night’s sleep, though, and on particularly cloudy nights Claudia can’t help but feel jealous of all the other, living citizens of Ashton who are snuggled up tight in their beds.

Ashton—it’s not that Claudia misses going into town, exactly, but those first few weeks of trying and failing to leave the boundaries of what she’s laughingly come to call her haunting grounds still make her shiver even years later. She wonders, sometimes, whether the townspeople know that she’s dead at all, or if in fact they’ve started to wonder why they never see her outside of her house or garden, but none of the bare handful of people who come around every month or so have ever remarked on it.

For all Claudia knows most of the town just believes her to be one of those people who grow ever stranger with age. She likes that thought, and embraces it to her fullest every day – and how could she not, being dead-yet-not-gone as she was?

* * *

Claudia sighs, and she can feel Charlotte’s eyes on her chest. Knows that, for the very first time, the girl consciously realizes that Claudia’s chest doesn’t move at all when she breathes – and then all the other little things fall into place for her, and Claudia can almost see the awful surprise begin to dawn on the girl’s face as she looks back on all the little tells she missed.

How she’d never once seen Claudia outside of the grounds of her house; how Claudia had never directly interacted with any other living thing aside from Oreo, and if Oreo was dead, then, well. She probably recalls never being offered any food or drink while at Claudia’s home, and how any she had brought along had never once been touched by Claudia – oh, it is all coming together for her now, Claudia can tell that just by watching the way her eyes squint together and her brows scrunch up.

“You’re dead,” Charlotte whispers, and then, louder, more determined, almost accusing: “You’re dead.”

And Claudia can only give her a soft nod and a softer smile. “I am.”

Here’s the thing, remember: nobody ever really comes to Ashton.

But nobody ever really leaves it, either.

* * *

Neither Claudia nor Oreo fault little Charlotte for making her – polite, well-excused! – escape after that revelation, but if Claudia’s being honest with herself it does sting a little. Oreo, too, seems to be taking Charlotte’s departure hard; he doesn’t leave Claudia’s side for the rest of the day as if he’s afraid she’ll leave him, too.

She never would, of course, even if she could leave her haunting grounds.

But as Claudia gets the both of them ready for the night she has to admit that she is glad for the company, even if both of them are too caught-up in wallowing in their disappointment to provide more than a spot of comforting warmth to the other.

* * *

The next day, so early in the morning that the summer heat hasn’t yet had the opportunity to settle into the ground, there is a knock on the door of Claudia’s house. She almost doesn’t answer it for fear of who she might find on the other side: an angry mob, perhaps, with their pitchforks and torches and shouting incessantly, or perhaps one of those ghost hunters she’s seen so many terrible TV shows about— So she dawdles for a while, taking her time walking over from the living room. The knocking’s not stopped in the slightest – it’s slow and measured but also very, very insistent, and it’s for that reason alone that Claudia sighs so deeply that her shoulders quake and reaches out to fasten her fingers around the door knob.

There’s no angry mob waiting for her when she finally does open the front door, of course. Claudia supposes that torches and pitchforks have long since gone out of style anyway.

Instead of half the town clamoring for her second death, the sight that greets Claudia instead is this: little Charlotte May, standing there in what looks like one of her best dresses for how clean it still is, holding the hand of a woman taller than Claudia herself – no mean feat, that.

“Miss Claudia? My daughter, along with several townsfolk, inform me that you’re dead, and that you’ve got the ghost of our cat hanging out with you,” the woman who must be Charlotte’s mother – the resemblance is uncanny, save for the hair – tells Claudia. There’s a wry edge to her tone, but under the circumstances Claudia can’t even begin to decipher it. “I thought I should come over and introduce myself to our ghost neighbor. I’m Ava May.”

And because Claudia is a good neighbor, non-corporality notwithstanding, she invites both Charlotte and Ava May inside.

She leads them to the parlour, much like she’d once led Charlotte there; and much like her daughter had, Ava May wordlessly settles down on one of the low couches. Charlotte settles down next to her – an endeavor that proves to be surprisingly difficult, as the other half of the couch is already occupied by Oreo.

He’s an attentive little thing, Claudia thinks, tail swishing back and forth while he watches his family and so, so careful not to actually touch either of them no matter how close Charlotte gets in her squirming.

“That’s him alright,” Ava May says after a long, long moment. Claudia can watch her take a deep breath in, her chest expanding, and then exhaling in one drawn-out heave that shudders through the woman’s whole body. “I—have questions, and quite a few of them at that, but,” and she looks meaningfully at Charlotte beside her, “if that’s okay with you, Miss Claudia, my daughter has a question of her own first.”

Claudia can only stare. It takes her a moment to compose herself enough to stutter, “You’re—You’re taking this awfully well, I must say.”

“You’re not the first strange thing the two of us have encountered,” Ava May laughs, good-naturedly, “and you’re less intimidating by far than the other one. And besides. Charlotte and I just moved to Ashton! Who’s to say these sorts of things aren’t normal for this town? You have to adapt to your new home, right, and if that new home includes the ghost of our cat and the ghost of the nice little lady living across the street . . . who am I to fight that?”

Claudia stares, and stares, and stares—and then, unbidden, she can no longer keep the smile off of her face.

And it kept on growing when Charlotte chose that moment to speak up and ask, “If Oreo is a ghost, and you’re a ghost, Miss Claudia – my question is, can you take care of him? So that I can visit him, and you?”

* * *

The very next evening finds Claudia sitting on her porch, enjoying the evening breeze – right alongside Ava May, holding a drink and enjoying the shade after a long day reworking Claudia’s flower patch to Claudia’s liking. In the yard, just next to that newly-arranged patch, little Charlotte is running after Oreo, going round and round and round around the apple tree and always only just coming close to brushing her fingers through the long hair of Oreo’s tail.

You see: nobody ever really comes to Ashton.

Except when sometimes they do.


End file.
